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Both Protestant and CatholicGeorge Herbert and "To all Angels and Saints"* by Andrew Hernack Descriptions of George Herbert's poetry and theology now present us with a dilemma. As Judy Z. Kronenfeld summarizes, our scholarly assessments are presently charocterized by movements in two contrary directions: The one defines ß Herbert confident in the meeningfulness of rituel, socroment and image; his poems are little incarnations; tenor and vehicle are almost by definition of equal weight. This is a Herbert confident in the presence of the divine in the earthly. At the other critical extreme, the Herbert defined is so wracked by the division between nature and grace, often categorized as a "Calvinist" or "Puritan" dilemme, that he contrives to make his poems undo themselves in orderto avoid claiming anything for the natural man or the artificer. God is not to be captured in images or similitudes; to try to do so is to limit Him.1 On the one hand, critics such as Rosemond Tuve, Louis L. Martz, and Heather A.R. Asals, among others, stress Herbert's incernationalism, sacramentalism, and catholic sensibility; on the other hand, since the publication of Barbara K. Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric and Stanley Fish's The Living Temple, the marked tendency in Herbert studies is clearly to insist that a protestant poetic affords our best understanding of The Temple.7 Thus 'This essay was first presented at a Special Session on "George Herberts Theology: Nearer Rome or Geneva?" at the 1986 MLA convention. The session was organized and chaired by Kenneth Alan Hovey. and the respondent was Richard Strier. 24Andrew Harnack the best of Herbert's readers are of divided opinion. We have become increasingly aware, as Chana Bloch reminds us, that "the theology of the pre-Laudian church and the precise character of Herbert's Protestantism ore still subject to debete."3 According to some of Herbert's reeders, it hes become especially difficult to explain recent critical trends in view of past scholarship. Stanley Stewart, for example, believes that the conclusions of much recent scholarship seriously conflict with the sound judgment of earlier, now classical, studies: The assumption that Herbert criticism has too much emphasized Catholic sources tends toward the view that it has therefore nurtured a false understanding of Herbert's poetry. Herbert either was or he was not expressing himself in the manner of those Good Friday Complaints cited by Tuve; the iconography of "medievol" Books of Hours either is or is not relevant to interpretation of The Temple. Contrariwise, the evidence either does or does not justify the designation of Herbert's poetics as "fully" Protestant, much less, as Richard Strier orgues, as radicolly Puritan.4 Stewart assumes that the recent "reformation" of The Temple is incompatible with older studies of Herbert. Convinced in particular that Richard Strier's revisionist reading of "To all Angels and Saints" eclipses too much earlier scholarship, Stewart seeks to reverse the trend toward radicolly protestantizing Herbert. One way he does so is by recalling attention to Herbert's first audience, that is, to Nicholas Ferrer's household at Little Gidding — and presumably its apprecietion for a distinctive catholic aesthetic. Stewart's endeovor to define Herbert may or may not be persuasive. However, his attempt focuses attention on a problem which needs solving if we are to read Herbert with confidence. Clearly we need to find a way of reading Herbert that transcends what has become, in John R. Mulder's phrase, "the chimoero of the One Right Reeding,"5 o way that ecknowledges the insights of both protestant and catholic readings. To this end, I argue that Herbert is oofn robustly catholic and soundly protestant. Indeed, to separate unnecessarily the two possi- "TOALL ANGELS AND SAINTS"25 bilities — protestant and catholic — may indeed be as much a distortion as to insist on one or the other as the only option. In the early seventeenth century it was entirely possible for one to be vigorously catholic and a convinced protestant at the same time — simul protestantus et catholicus, to Latinize a formula. As a Christian, Herbert gave clear expression to both possibilities in his life and made such e union...
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